


A Fevered God

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, H.D. Poetry
Genre: F/F, Greek History, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Inspired by Real Events, fictional queer characters, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 22:25:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1664729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Telesilla gives what honey can come from the mouth of a muse: words, caresses. Liquid and sticky; lingering. Full of all that she would have said in their future years. Aegiale’s mouth on hers is wet, washed with tears, and her fingers at Aegiale’s arms grip tight, bruise.</p><p>Too soon, the bright peel of the alarum bell rings out. The Spartans approach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fevered God

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peninsulam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam/gifts).



> A gift to my dear friend and generous beta Peninsulam.
> 
> +++
> 
> In 494 B.C.E. the Spartan Army, having defeated the Argives on the field of battle, set their sights upon the city of Argos, to take as it stood, seemingly defenseless, its heroes dead on the Argive Plain. Upon besieging the city, however, they found it less feeble than expected, for young and elderly, slave and free, stood armed along the wall, and before the city gates stood the women of Argos, armed and shouting. 
> 
> At the front stood their leader, Telesilla, famed and respected for her poetry and song. With her women, she so startled the Spartans that, realizing it would be offensive to kill women in battle and even more shameful to be beaten by them, they retreated from the field, leaving Argos in peace.
> 
> Little is known of Telesilla beyond her fateful actions that day. All that remains of her writing is a single fragment and a few spare words, but the image of her statue, standing tall with her poetry thrown down and her helmet held up, in the temple of Aphrodite at Argos, is left us in the writings of Pausanias. Writing three hundred years later, Plutarch attests that Argives continue to celebrate Telesilla’s victory each year in a festival where men and women switch clothing for a day. Her story, though, continues to inspire; here I give my humble offering in her memory.

The helmet pains her neck, the cheek-braces press cold against her temples. She aches, bone-deep, with the redness of a weary, setting sun, but still she twists to fasten the armor, lacing the cuirass until the seams kiss. She is thinner than her brother, with none of his breadth of chest, and the stiffened leather carapace fits her ill. The longbones of her calves do not stretch enough, either, to wear his greaves, so her legs remain bare. His panoply, his armor: stained now with his drained lifeblood and fitted, poorly, to her insufficient body.

The shield which Peranthos wore like the reach of his arm, like a gift of the gods, jars her muscles when she moves, taking the deep swinging thrust she’d seen him practice, over and again. His spears litter the battlefield in splinters and stakes, few of many jagged, barren trees stabbed across the plain stretching out from Argos. Aegiale holds out another, plain wood with a bare, unadorned iron point. It stands many heads taller than either woman, but the wood is smooth, weighted, under Telesilla’s hand. They haven’t enough left for each to fit a second down their backs to rest weighty against their shoulders. A meager army, equipped with the ghostly panoplies of their killed brothers, husbands, fathers.

She lofts the spear and lowers her head; her words should be to Athena, for swiftness, for bravery, for bloodlust, to Hera for protection, but they are instead to her dead Peranthos, her twinned-soul brother and longest companion, for a swift meeting in the afterlife. Aegiale’s hand – small, cold with wet, nervous sweat – touches the back of her neck. Bare, like her legs, like her arms, her throat and her shaking, scattered veins. Bare to the world and to the Spartan blades.

Her chin lifts, unsteady with the unaccustomed weight, and she lifts her foot. To battle.

++

As a girl, her feet had flown across the Argive plain like Athena herself, hard, sun-cracked clay leaving the soles of her bare feet battle-red. Peranthos played Achilles, who lived immortal in their stories, and every stick in his hand rang as an iron-forged sword. Later, in the sweat-drenched linens of her sickbed, she would imagine the clay of the plain in her veins, hardening like the dry summer and leaving her legs and arms heavy. She would wait, and wait, for spring rains.

The sickness struck like the temper of a god: swift and fervent. Prayers and implorations made little good; nor the heavy-sweet smoke of the healers, their poultices spread in caking layers on her chest. Her mind raved. 

Little remains in her mind of this time: the heaviness of her chest, like Atlas’s world set upon it; a cool cloth against her forehead; her mother’s voice grave with worry. The pilgrimage remains more clearly present. The flickering sun outside their carriage streaked across her cheeks, warming her clay-heavy limbs: the light of hope.

She never saw the oracle, but her voice is that which gives shape to her dreams, her proclamation that which settled her path. _Dedicate your daughter to the Muses,_ the oracle said, and from that day Telesilla was not without a stylus in her hand. With her mind thus engaged, the weight slowly settled away from her limbs. The spring rain came again, washed her veins clear and let her mind flow like the early, fierce trickle of a river’s birth.

++

_But Artemis, O maidens,  
Fleeing from Alpheus_

Her stylus scratches, strained and slow; nothing like the fleetness of foot Arethusa begged of Artemis. Women fleeing men, eternally (nymphs, gods; it matters little). The sweet-voiced, sweet-faced choir for whom she writes may come to know the same, but for now they are mere girls, long-lashed maidens with voices like the clear, sweet spring Arethusa flowed into, nymph turned to water to escape a river god. 

What lengths Artemis’s sworn girls take – Arethusa to a spring; Daphne to a green-leafed laurel – and what lengths the gods pursue them, heady and careless in their lust. 

Telesilla sets her stylus aside; her words come laced bitterly, now, with the fear of pursuit aching and sour in the back of her throat. Not suitable for a spring celebration nor the bright-eyed hopes of her devoted choir. The winter sun filters through the linen at her window, its fingers cold to her skin, entwining as they do with the easterly wind blowing off the sea. The angry dregs of winter, insistent on their presence, wrapping skin and cloak and salt-buffeted marble with their chill tendrils. A storm approaches. 

Aegiale’s hand bears wine, warm and musky with spices, which she settles at the edge of Telesilla’s writing table. Warmed through the cup, her fingers then curl against Telesilla’s skin, at the bared curve of her neck as it rises from her peplos. 

“The spring festival?” she says, her breath warm with the same sea-flung spices in the bone cup now at Telesilla’s fingers. Offered up by the gods in Thrace and Illyria, plucked from the loam-rich banks of the Nile, gathered from the halls of Abyssinian kings. Or so the bards sing. The sweat of a slave’s brow, the blood-burst blisters of their palms make ugly songs. 

The rape of girls; deaths disguised by the acts of gods. Such things are sung in praise, in exaltation, in prayer. She shoves the tablet further from her; Aegiale’s fingers tighten on her neck. Their fine, neat little tips press against the rushing of her blood.

“Yes,” Telesilla says, word-weary. “Songs for sweet-voiced girls, of rape and virginity. To entice them husbands.”

“We do not all have the gift of your lyrical hand,” Aegiale says, with calm reason. “And so not the privilege of your choices.” 

The bow of her chin, the press of her lips just against the moons of Aegiale’s fingernails, would be enough apology, but still she says, “Forgive me.” For when Telesilla’s cheeks grew sun-streaked in battle-play, and her hand ached with words she had not yet learned to guide, Aegiale’s hands worked spindle and loom to weave her wedding veil. When Telesilla’s lyrics first rang out at festival, Aegiale still mourned a husband lost to a war across the sea and his children that would never grow in her womb.

Aegiale may take a husband again, if she wishes; but from her hands grows linen as fine as spiders’ webs and well sought-after, and a home she always has in Telesilla’s house.

“You are forgiven, my love,” Aegiale says, with the indulgent patience of years unfurled ahead. Her lips find Telesilla’s temple, their press a blessing on the tangled words within. 

“Tell me again.” Telesilla’s voice, half-snatched by the wind, comes soft as a whisper; Aegiale’s keen ears hear.

“You are forgiven,” she says, smile on her voice.

“Not that,” Telesilla says, though Aegiale knows.

“My love. My muse; my honey-breathed poet.” She kneels at Telesilla’s chair, hands curling into the flesh of her thighs. Telesilla’s chiton is of Aegiale’s own loom, its warp and weft woven fine with the oils of her fingers, with the twisting of her knowing hands; through it Aegiale’s hands now warm Telesilla’s storm-chilled skin.

“My star, my thunder; my vain beloved.” Her fig-ripe mouth opens, curving in delight, and Telesilla leans to taste it.

“I am vain,” she says, words small between their lips. “For I could listen to your sweet words for the rest of my days, and abandon my own.”

“You wouldn’t.” Aegiale’s lips press to her lips, to the rise of her cheeks, to her flutter-closed eyes. “You would miss the scratching of your stylus and the wax under your nails. You would miss your choir’s voices singing your songs.”

“Perhaps,” Telesilla says as Aegiale’s hands trace paths up her arms, under the heavy wool of her peplos. Her skin prickles, warmed. “But there are always other poets, other voices.” Aegiale’s breath puffs on her breast where she nestles her head, the tip of her nose cold against the softness of Telesilla’s inner arm. “I could let one of them be a voice for Argos.” Hands wrapping her waist, thumbs pressing into her ribcage, Aegiale’s deft fingers, which work a spindle like a part of their own being, unclasp her belt. 

“Don’t be foolish,” she says, voice hushed against the soft curve of Telesilla’s belly, where she buries her mouth in the familiar linen, where she seeks Telesilla’s skin through the weave. “You’re an Argive daughter, blessed by the muses. You’ll never relinquish your stylus, or your place.” Her tongue worries the linen, wet and hot; her pleased laughter sounds when Telesilla’s breath comes in a gasp, when her body arches into Aegiale’s wanting hands.

The soles of Telesilla’s sandals scrape against the mosaic floor as she opens her knees, Aegiale’s palms pressed to their inner curves. The small hairs at the back of her neck are lifted by the wind; the slow draw of her chiton over her legs brings with it a chill which wraps its winding tendrils over her calves, her knees, the pink inner flesh of her thighs, but is chased by the warmth of Aegiale’s mouth, burning and fierce. 

She drips with need, already, before Aegiale’s mouth finds her aching slit. Before, with her tongue worrying along the crease of her thigh, damp with the cooled sweat of day’s end, with her nose tucked against the heavy curls which spread, lush and dark, across the rise of her mound. While her thumbs stroke down her lips, coaxing them to open and swell, while they slide in the twin valleys just inside, setting Telesilla’s thighs to quivering, her breath to soft, just-caught gasps. 

They maintain separate bed chambers; Telesilla trusts her household servants not to gossip, if the city even cared, but they’ve each had long years accustomed to bed linens warmed to their own bodies alone, air broken by the breathing of a single pair of lungs. Still, some nights they’ll share the long hours. Wine on her lips, under the canopy dyed the rich hue of saffron which paints their skin golden under the light of long tallow candles, Aegiale will spread Telesilla open, just to gaze upon her, to see how she swells with need and want, before ever pressing her lips to that hungry flesh. 

She does just the same now, though the air is cool and the light grey, strokes Telesilla open and holds her there, close enough that her breath flows in short, bursting waves over Telesilla’s chilled flesh, over her slick cunt warm with blood-throbbing need. Her hair is twisted up and back, as befits a widow, but Telesilla slides her fingertips over its oil-shined curls to tangle her hands in its plaits and twists. Aegiale’s eyes flick up, with amusement edging out annoyance, and she presses back against the impetus of Telesilla’s urging fingers only for a moment before tucking her head forward and bringing her mouth over Telesilla’s slick, open center.

Her mouth cups, drinking of her like a sworn virgin before a hiera, sucking deep the ritual wine; her lips, on Telesilla’s need-hungry cunt, are soft. Long, searching strokes of her tongue work up the valleys and folds of her cunt, mapping her, knowing her. Each trace sets Telesilla trembling anew; two short years at her side, in her bed, to know her flesh, and still Aegiale’s touch surprises. 

Less and less gentle, her mouth works insistently, until finally she sweeps the broad, harsh, flat of her tongue over Telesilla’s aching bud, sending her hips bucking into Aegiale’s firm grasp. With determination, she licks – hard, hungry – tongue punishing against the tender, swollen flesh, thumbs pressing tight to hold her cunt spread. Telesilla’s chest heaves, each breath harsh, their echoes in the throb of her blood under the merest tender skin against Aegiale’s tongue. Winter forgotten as heat pools in the low cradle of her gut, as her buttocks and the backs of her knees grow slick with sweat, as her lips dry with panting and her fingers twist without her mind’s accord. It is on the sharp gasp of Aegiale’s surprise that she breaks; the flutter of Aegiale’s breath on her cunt, the curls of her hair twisted tight, the shocked and lusty eyes that find hers, under shaking lashes, as she ruts, jagged and uncontrolled, against Aegiale’s mouth. 

Her fingers loosen as she collapses back, as Aegiale rocks onto her heels and pats at her disarrayed hair with false dismay and the crooked edge of a smile. Aegiale rises; her cheeks are flushed red and lips shiny, wet; her hair falls from its combs over her temple and one golden earring sits askew. Telesilla would pull out each pin holding the chiton at her shoulders, would cup her breasts and bring them to suckle, would draw each comb free of her tresses and tug at the curls until Aegiale bares the long, fragile line of her throat and whimpers, deep in her chest. But the air grows colder; the sun disappears; and her own hands are hungry for Aegiale’s soft flesh and soaking cunt, so she grasps the front of Aegiale’s belt to bring their lips together. Her own essence on Aegiale’s mouth is slick and all the sweeter for its place on her beloved’s lips.

Telesilla brings her trembling thighs together, tugging at the gossamer-woven linen of Aegiale’s chiton to bare her legs, her hips, her cunt, and pulls her into her lap. Aegiale’s legs spread, prettily, and her toes only just reach the floor; Telesilla’s arm, snug around her back, steadies. She could tease, could draw out her touches, feather-light, like calming a skittish new calf; could feel Aegiale’s pulse flutter, then throb, at her neck and the crease of her hip, could tame her hands until Aegiale’s words come pleading. 

She doesn’t, however. She presses her palm firm against Aegiele’s cunt, her lips swollen and hot and spread open, wet, and lets Aegiale rut against her. Her mouth works the join of her neck and shoulder, where the long muscle tightens as Aegiale’s head falls back, mouth slack and trembling, and the knuckle of her thumb rubs against Aegiale’s tight little bud, in time with her rocking. 

Under her forearm, the braided leather of Aegiale’s belt rubs, leaving its plaited mark in her flesh as she bears up Aegiale’s whip-tight weight, her arched back the fulcrum of her movement, now swift and frantic. Just the tips of her fingers slip into Aegiale’s salt-slick hollow, her hand a crescent into which Aegiale rocks, with grasping, fluttering need, as she bursts in rolling waves, body shuddering against Telesilla’s strength. 

Her breath is like the hot, damp wind that sweeps off the sea in the depths of summer, sticking to Telesilla’s skin. Fingers gripping at her sides, linen crumpled in her hands, Aegiale clings to her; Telesilla strokes up her back, long gestures born of some deep, calming instinct. Aegiale is only ever gentle and grasping like this in the panting, hazy moments after, and Telesilla cherishes the need in her flexing fingers, the slack muscles of her thighs, the mere moments of composure shucked away like a too-warm cloak before the sly wit returns to Aegiale’s eyes, the deftness to her fingers, the sharpness to her stride. 

“Will you stay the night with me?” Telesilla’s words brush past Aegiale’s ear, to whisper through her hair, but Aegiale nonetheless nuzzles against her, mouth to skin, and murmurs her assent. 

“The wind bites tonight,” she says, though no excuse is needed between them; her flesh leaves Telesilla’s all the colder for departing as she pulls away, stands. She reaches one hand back, though, to entwine their fingers, warp and weft, to take them together to bed and dreams. 

++

The sun has not yet broken over the windowsill when a rapping sounds on the door. Telesilla wakes with the bustle; her body maid pushes into the chamber with apologetic haste. 

“What news?” Telesilla rises, wraps herself in a cloak. In the bed, Aegiale leans up on her elbows, blinking.

“Spartans,” Elpida says, with economy; no more is needed. If Spartans come, war comes, and death. The hoplites will march, shields and spears, and the women sing them away while their hearts mourn. Peranthos will fight, will shine his panoply with sweet-scented oil and kiss their mother goodbye.

“The Queen will need you,” Aegiale murmurs. As poet of the city, Telesilla serves as a courtly adviser; her position at the Queen’s elbow, though, serves more as a palliative than source of political acumen. Soothing words and a connection to the great oracle who set her feet upon the path of lyrics embellish Telesilla’s standing. Beyond its merit, she fears some days.

Elpida’s cheeks are pink with the hurry and the early morning, but when Telesilla nods, she steps to help her dress. A fresh-washed chiton, hemmed in glinting saffron threads: her courtly finest. Girded round with a belt of hammered gold clasped in carnelian and caught about her shoulders and arms with buttons of ivory, carved within steps of the Nile and brought to her over the traversing routes of the Mediterranean. Her face Elpida brushes with powder and pinks with ochre; her lips and brows painted; her eyes darkened with kohl. 

Aegiale remains in bed, swathed in a coverlet of finely-spun yarn from the goats which dot the Argive hills. She has few enough chances to linger without handiwork, and Telesilla welcomes her company, her quiet presence, to sooth her unquiet mind. Leant up on her elbows, Aegiale watches with fine acuity the sweep of Elpida’ brush, the delicate twists of her fingers as she smoothes powders and oils and pastes into Telesilla’s skin. Her gaze sweeps with the heat lacking in the winter sun, with attention usually given to examining fine-spun threads traded from the East. Pondering; acquisitive. 

Painted and dressed, Telesilla sends Elpida away. “Spartans,” she says, to the cool air and Aegiale’s quiet, watchful eyes. 

“Take care,” Aegiale says. “The court before a battle –” She needn’t finish; an embattled king is a dangerous man to come to cross-arms with, and Telesilla’s words do not please all who hear them equally. 

“I only go to support the Queen,” Telesilla says, to Aegiale’s wry-twisted mouth, her unconvinced brow. “The King’s decisions will weigh upon him; she will need her advisers near-to-hand.”

“Yes,” Aegiale agrees. “Only mind your words.” In the center of the broad-framed bed, shoulders square under the gauzy chrysalis of her soft-woven coverlet, Aegiale’s smallness is that of the beetle, the scorpion. Sharp with a fierceness that gives Telesilla strength. The darkness of her eyes wants reassurance: words Telesilla could conjure for whole publics, for crowds before her in the agora, but not here, not to belie the forceful, wanting fear which Aegiale will not show. 

“I will,” Telesilla says, mouth to her forehead, her temples and the sleep-oily lids of her eyes, to the sweep of her firm, unyielding cheekbone and the curve of her giving lips. “I will; I will.”

++

The hall buzzes, a hive in the highest days of productive spring, when she arrives. Like Telesilla, all the members of the Argive court – the powerful and great, the influential and wise – have servants with ears close-pressed to the ground for news and knowledge, and they are here to make their opinions known. Spartans! The Argives haven’t warred with Spartans in a generation; but in that time the Spartans grew and grew in their influence over the Peloponnese. Alliances forged and battles won left the Spartans on the very threshold of Argos. For all their pride in the training and battle-bravery of the hoplite forces of their country, the very best of Argolis, six-score years of Spartan expansion and battle prowess have left the Argives whispering of their diminished power. 

On the dais, King Alector and Queen Myrine sit, enthroned, encircled by the representatives from all quarters of the city. Across the throng, Telesilla senses, in her still-shouldered stare, the Queen’s fear, and in his stooping head under the humble gold circlet she sees Alector’s age. The Argive democracy reaches back to the days of her grandfather’s grandfather, but the gravity of a king is a difficult thing to throw aside, and so his word is needed in matters of war. But their king has not held his battle-spear since his now-grown son was a babe, and he doubtless struggles with the thought of sending his heir and the strength of his city’s young men against a foe grown so formidable. 

The crowds of the hall do not part for her; though she has stood on the dais at every public rite since she first bled, the voice of the city, she remains, still, a woman. Had her quarter wanted her to stand for them, she could not. So she serves through poetics, not rhetorics, and leaves the politicking to those chosen to it. 

She bows to the Queen, who greets her with vast relief spreading over her face. The King sees her, but looks through her; his haggard eyes rest only on his generals.

“We don’t know the Spartans come for battle,” Queen Myrine says, her voice very low, once Telesilla is seated at her side. Despite the silver rivered through her loam-black hair, her eyes are the guileless blue of puddled water after the rains, childlike and wishful. Telesilla stills her chin, doesn’t shake her head against the incipient hope.

“Have they sent treaty messengers?” Myrine inhales but says nothing. “Then they’ve come for war.” 

Next to them, Alector sits in silence within the circle of his war council, while throughout the hall the city’s elected men mill and shout and proclaim, as though the decision had not been made for them. To war they will go; they wait only upon Alector’s word for the gathering of their troops to begin.

When he stands, finally, the hall does not hush but pulls in its breath. He nods once, and turns and leaves, and Argos is at war.

++

The scent of straw washes over her first, earthy and dry. Laid in a thick bed over the floor of the temple, it waits, silver-pale in the low light, to receive the blood of the sacrifice. It should smell of the stables – winter-dried straw and the warm, life-heavy stench of animals, shit and sweat and milky sweetness – but, rather, under the dry, clean straw the cold marble of the temple lingers, sharp in the senses. The air, heavy, has soaked in the frantic, panic-sour blood of sacrifices for generations. 

Her first battle hiera colored all those that followed: the milk-white hair of the goat; the sweet oiled leather of the hoplites’ panoplies; the crush of Peranthos’ hand around hers; the splattered stream of blood. The straw had been piled high, above her meager height, that of a sickly child, and must have soaked in all the blood; still, in her mind’s eye, she sees a trickle escape, blackish like the tar used to paint the hulls of their ships, like the dark wax scraped smooth on her tablet, and reach its sticky fingers to her toes. She hadn’t yet bled, herself, hadn’t yet learned the shapes blood can take, flowing or dense, crumbling and dry or vicious red to coat your hands, your lips, but she knew enough to know how life surged in it. In her memory, the blood snakes around her feet, encircles her, ensnares her, before it creeps in closer and breaks over her toes, her ankles, in a strange tide. 

Marking her. Blessing her for battle.

Now, in the temple, she stands behind the hoplites once more, but Peranthos is amongst their numbers, shoulder-to-shoulder in the phalanx they will form on the battlefield, too. The sheen of his cuirass comes from rose oil, a gift from her own hands, and when he bows his head down, the nape of his neck stretches bare and vulnerable. It is Aegiale’s hand in hers now, fine and sparrow-boned; the calloused tips of her fingers stroke the back of Telesilla’s palm. 

The Spartans advance at speed, up the Peloponnese and across the Kynouria. Argos has called in its soldiers, but it may take days for the full army to return from the reaches of their region, so the city-stationed men ready themselves. After darkness fell last evening, the night air filled with the sounds of hoplites readying themselves for battle, their rousing and the clashing of their spears as they mock-brawled. Today, with the dawn’s light, they gather for the hiera to Hera, the request for battle-strength and the drawing of the first blood. Two goats will die, throats slit and blood touched to the foreheads of each soldier, the sacrificed deaths made against future loss.

The King takes first blood; the priest unfurls like a dew-touched frond, reaches with difficulty to his height while the Alector’s eyes fix forward and his chin does not bend. His men follow until each is marked. Telesilla swallows against the copper-rich air, cloying and too-warm, and the waves of fresh, winter-chilled wind which buffet against her as they depart the temple are welcome. Her eyes sting, leaving the salt-tang of unborn tears in her throat.

The hiera is the hoplite farewell; outside the temple, the men step into rank and begin to march, taking with them their first blood, protection against the spilling of their own. If permitted, Telesilla would break their files, would rush in and curl her arms around her brother’s neck and whisper the goodbyes she lacked the heart to say, really. But she may not, so instead she catches his eye and his short, sharp nod, and watches his back as he falls into line.

His battalion has long since turned the corner when the Queen’s hand finds her elbow, birdlike and sharp, to guide her away from the temple. Silently, they walk from the heart of the city, their steps mere shadows of the echoing hobnails of thousands, until they reach the city gates. An armed battlement is hardly the place for a queen, but Myrine nonetheless ascends, to stand atop the wall and see the men of the city away.

The army leaves behind a hush, a city too held in thrall by its fear to whisper. Dust erupts under feet and hooves and chariot-wheels, a hazy cloak on the shoulders of the men like the veil of death. The last men pass through the gates, which creak closed behind them with a groaning whine like a keening woman, too close to those that will soon follow. From the wall, the troops spread below them, a tapestry woven of men and leather and the shiny, glinting beads of spear-points.

“Will they live to come back to us? Will my king return?” The Queen’s eyes stretch out across the plain; in the far distance, the King’s standard may just be seen, a streak of red across the oil-darkened leather of the hoplite armor. 

“I write of things that have happened, my queen. Not of those yet to come.” The queen shields her eyes and looks still.

“You might still pen their safe return,” she says, finally, as she drops her hand away from her brow. Her eyes, when they meet Telesilla’s, have aged; she seems to care little that she speaks to the poet rather than the sybil. Telesilla bows her head.

“I will do my best to write them home,” she says and wonders if words, mere words spun across a page, have such power.

++

Over the night air, they hear the triumphant clash of Spartan spears on Spartan shields. The Spartans don’t sing their victory, don’t brighten the sky with bonfires and color the wind with ale-soaked boasts. They beat their shields, as one man, and the crash taunts Zeus himself with its thunder. The city of Argos does not sleep.

The messenger arrives in the morning; little more than a boy, he nonetheless wears the thin, whip-sharp muscles of Spartan youth. Queen Myrine assembles her court to receive him, this naked, nut-brown bringer of their fate. As the city’s poet, Telesilla stands once more on the royal council, as she has for dignitaries and tradesmen, for princes and generals, and now for a bare-footed, shorn-haired boy to tell them their men are dead.

She inscribes the city’s history, and for what? For the death of their soldiering men, for the imminence of the Spartans at their gates, for their homes burned and their women, their girls and boys, their slaves raped. 

“Two days to gather your dead,” the boy says. Myrine nods; this is customary. Telesilla would like to snap his neck, to see the calm, unblinking expression fail and fade. 

Eight thousand men, battle-trained and fire-forged, and not one returns alive. 

++

The city mourns, hushed in the night. Telesilla has sent Elpida to her family, smaller now by her two brothers, dead on the blood-rained Argive plain. She reaches, therefore, for the shutters herself, pulling them closed with a snap that echoes, satisfactorily, in her ear. She would shutter the whole house, seal it against the blood and pain that sears the air, take her own grief deep in her stomach, secreted away. But the city mourns; this is not her loss alone.

She hadn’t heard Aegiale’s footsteps, hadn’t felt her presence until Aegiale’s hands, cold, touch her hips. “Come to bed.” Aegiale’s breath skates over the chill skin of her neck, the presence of her life against the death beyond their windows. “You can do nothing else for them now,” she says, against Telesilla’s mind, which searches ever for aid, for a solution, for her brother’s life saved on the battlefield. 

Willing as a calf she turns, then, drops her mouth to the milk-warm skin of Aegiale’s neck, breathes in the proof of her life. “They cannot be –” She cannot finish. Aegiale’s nose nudges against her temple, the tip cold, and her breath comes in short, sharp pants. 

“I will attend you, in the morning. It is – it is not as difficult, with a friend.” Aegiale has, of course, walked the battlefield before, searched the faces of the departed men for one familiar. Telesilla has not; she has sung their deaths, has written their praises, but has not yet lifted bodies into straw-lined carts, has never looked into each death-glazed eye for the gaze of a loved one. She will now; she will find Peranthos, will give him the funeral rites deserved by a man so loyal. 

“The gods bless me with your friendship,” Telesilla says. A familiar statement, but meager of meaning. 

“They are generous, but fickle,” Aegiale agrees. “But come to bed.”

She does; Aegiale unclasps her chiton, then Telesilla’s own, leaving the fabric to fall heavily on the ground. It is not like her, to be so careless with the fine weavings of her hand, and Telesilla feels the ground shift, once more, at the uncertainty. She follows, though.

Under the woolen coverlet and a warm hide from one of the goats who dot the low rises of the Oligyrtos, tended to by boys not old enough to march to war, Aegiale curls her body around Telesilla’s. They fit together like two warp threads, like consecutive strokes from Telesilla’s pen. Aegiale’s hand presses Telesilla’s breastbone like she aches to feel her heart.

Her hand is comfort; it is mooring and anchor, sword-in-hand and the heaviness of ink against her skin. Telesilla leans into it, taking what warmth Aegiale can give, greedy and discomfited, her mourning fitting her ill, like a peplos that overwhelmed, poorly-cut and tripping her with its myriad drapings. Still wretched and twisted around her heart, Peranthos is not yet lost, not like she knows in her mind, and her nerves and skin and blood thrum with him still. Aegiale’s eyes, heavy and dark with pity and sadness, weigh against the bare skin of her neck, of her shoulders, and her brother lurks behind her closed eyelids, twisted mouth and sturdy spear. 

“I cannot,” she says, into her own hand; a pray heard only by her own skin. Peranthos veils her senses, her eyes, her ears: she cannot feel but for the press of Aegiale’s insistent hand. She wonders if they were ever twisted like this, she and her womb-twinned brother, limbs entangled and skin as one. From her, his distance grows: a wall, a plain, a spear in the side and a life’s-full blood spilt in the dirt. 

Aegiale’s whisper skims across her skin, twists in her hair: _you can._ Loss Aegiale knows, intimate like the very lines of her hand, like the branching veins at her pale elbow, inscribed on her body, written by the gods. Her own husband and her brother before him, their blood feeding the very soil which must, now, streak Peranthos’s skin, stain his greaves, fill his helmet. Still she lives. 

So must they all.

Neither sleeps the long night through, skin sticky and cold together, but neither weeps, either. Clinging, Aegiale’s hand tucks to the curve of Telesilla’s ribcage, damp and unmoving and solid as Athena’s temple watching over the city. From the gods no comfort comes, and thus it must be made between them. Shared breaths, rising lungs and wet mouths; the restless kick of a leg, their bodies insistent and alive. The world vast beyond them, stretching to the Gate of Heracles and into the unknown and yet contained in the heavy, dark place between them. The night, long, unmoved by the sorrow of a city and the unshed words of its poet, trapped as they are in her tight-closed throat. 

No longer for her sweet spring lyrics nor songs of joy. Her darkness-sworn oath metes all her future words to epitaphios only, to funeral praise and the logos of mourning. Aegiale will offer her stores of fine linen for shrouds, to veil their dead for the passage over the river. Her hands like those of the Moirai, spinning and weaving and cutting life. Telesilla’s words, Aegiale’s threads will be but few, no doubt, for their two-days grace to gather and burn, to weep and remember, are all that remain between their unprotected city and the might of the Spartan army.

In the darkness, Telesilla’s hand curls, and Aegiale draws her closer. 

++

Flame-bright and unforgiving, the sun rises on a city too-burnt. Telesilla shields her eyes to gaze up at the sky, clear and sweet and cold, and thinks of Icarus, of the charred life-blood of feathers littering the sky, spread heavy across the ground. To live is not to dare to fly too close, she thinks: to shape the bricks of their city, to make love and make children, to live, to survive, to thrive. The gods are cruel to punish such a drive. 

Myrine grew frail overnight, skin like a shriveled onion and eyes the dark, sunken weight of the lifeless cave-pools in the waste west of the city. At Telesilla’s touch on her elbow, she sinks heavily, as though having spent the morning in wait of such support, and allows her to lead them, together, down the steps of the dais. Aegiale waits at the door of the hall, the grief-stung women of the court too daze-eyed to send her away, and Telesilla is thankful for Aegiale’s strong hand, steady at her arm. 

A maidservant scrambles to shove open the door, and they flinch away as one at the driving sun, mocking and golden against their tired skin. Blinking, they stumble forward together: the queen, the poetess, the weaver. Handcarts and wagons, filled with straw, spread over the acropolis, pulled and driven by women as stiff-backed as Aegiale, by children wild-eyed, by the elderly who have seen too much war: the city has readied itself. 

They move out with none of the grace of the Hoplites, stumbling and weary long before they meet the battle-plain. 

The stench finds their noses long before they reach the valley: sun-rotten corpses, bursting with foul blood and shit and vomit. Where death invades the very air so, it would seem life cannot be, yet when they round the peak, when their battle-dead reveal themselves across the cursed plain, life insists. Life, in the buzzing of flies; life, in the angry snapping of dogs; life, in the awful beaks of vultures tearing away at flesh. 

Some of the women find their unholy strength in nature’s desecration and tear down the hill with wild, piercing screams to chase the scavengers away. Others stand, struck dumb by the sight, or collapse to their knees, necks and shoulders and spines gone limp. The children huddle, clutching at skirts or each other, holding tight to the stilled wheels of carts like lodestones. At Telesilla’s elbow, the Queen trembles. 

“We will honor them,” Telesilla says, quietly; then again, to the crowds. Myrine slips away from her like the fluttering of discarded silk, but Aegiale stands firm, stalwart as the olive tree, as the temple column, and lends her strength. Telesilla turns; Argos stands before her. Not its bricks and temples, but its people, broken and scared. 

“Find your dead,” she says. “Find them, honor them, and gather their weapons. For Sparta has not killed us yet, and while we live, Argos lives with us.” Before her, the women stir; old men straighten their creaking backs; children settle and stand ready. A stumbling hoard, yes, but the strength of a proud city not yet sapped. Forward they pull, into the valley where lie their dead.

++

Pyres burn across the city, the stench of charred flesh flooding all: skin, clothing, hair. Ash under fingernails and streaked up arms. Smoke-choked wind blew across her skin, whipping her hair into the snarled, snapping snakes of the gorgon. Her stare heavy, her limbs leaden. She can no longer see the body, the fleshly vessel of her womb-twin, swallowed as it is by flames, burning with his hoplite brothers.

She had known him by his armor alone. The ghastly gash of his neck, flayed open and sun-blackened, had paled next to the splitting of his skin, bursting in the heat like spoiled meat, meals already for birds and dogs and vermin alike. By the time she reached him, her shoulders burned and ached, their muscles drawn tight against the weight-weary shiver which threatened, with each stoop, with every stone-heavy body lifted and heaved, to overtake all her movements. Her arms black with blood, up to her shoulders, and her feet torn raw from the gritty muck which seeped into her sandals.

By the time she reached him, the motions had become familiar: lean to the body; gaze at the face, less and less hope of recognition with each swollen, misshapen visage; examine the armor; lift and heave the body into a cart. So her hands were already gripping the shoulder laces of his cuirass, ready to lurch back, to throw the diminishing strength of her body against the solid, unyielding mass of his and lift, Aegiale at his calves, when, with a lurching movement, his shield clattered from his death-stiffened hand and the sun glinted, blind-bright, off the bronze boss in the center.

She dropped his body; Aegiale stumbled, fell forward to her knees, a supplicant in the battle-mud. Later, Telesilla wonders if she had conjured the unblinking shock of Aegiale’s face, the slow-dawning knowledge. 

The mud on his shield would not wipe away, her blood-slick hand only smearing it more, leaving dark, grimy smudges across the metal. Still, she knew it to touch: the twisting Argive water snake, its bold, snapping head familiar, emblazoned on the King’s seal and the lowliest foot-soldier’s shield alike, but embellished with the crossed scrolls of her family. A lineage of poets, protecting their much-loved soldiers.

Neither well nor enough.

She didn’t wail, didn’t cry, only swallowed down the bile creeping up her throat and nodded to Aegiale. Marking which cart they lift him to, which bodies form his final cohort, Telesilla wiped her forehead – sweat dripping coldly down her brow, in the furrows of her nose, salty and bitter at the corners of her lips – and continued.

++

Claiming his body, she performs what ablutions she may. He deserves his due mourning, his body washed in sweet oil and crowned with woven green cypress branches to await his wake, his three days’ praise, her songs and Aegiale’s finest shroud.

No time remains to linger, though: the bodies fester, split and spill their vicious humors, and the Spartans wait, camped in the treeline beyond the plain. So she attends him in the agora, pressed against other women working in tandem, their hands washing, washing, their lips thin, their shoulders shaking. His armor she cuts off, the laces too swollen with blood to untie, and places the stiffened leather pieces at her feet. Fragmented, they huddle, the broken shell of a crushed beetle. Daubing at his face, she searches for the familiar lines of his eyes, the crooked hump of his nose, the smile that pulled at his lips, but in the lifeless flesh she cannot find him.

Aegiale comes to her at the end of the day; she has spent her own hours organizing the distribution of cloth, passing frayed-edge fragments to each woman to drape, meagre and ill-fitting, over the faces of the dead. One piece remains in her arms, the brilliant golden crimson of a blood orange. 

Telesilla does not recognize it; before her eyes the color seems to float, a spark of life in the scape of flaking, dried blood and putrefying flesh.

“It was to be a gift,” Aegiale says, holding it out. Her hands quiver. “For the spring festival. For your robes.” Telesilla looks at the fabric, her eyes aching and heavy. “Against your hair –” Aegiale says, but her words fail, fall feebly between them.

A long moment stretches between them, then Telesilla lifts her arm, clutches at the edge of the folded fragment. It falls away from Aegiale’s hands like the licking tease of a flame; it is the crimson one thinks a flame should be, before it reveals itself as sparking yellow and steady blue. It will burn to black, just the same.

Draped over Peranthos’s face, the fabric flutters with the movement of the crowded agora. Telesilla bends to gather his panoply, the stacked shells too light in her curled arms, and leaves with Aegiale at her elbow.

++

The bodies burn through the second day; dusk falls painted red with the smoke and haze of the city. Telesilla spends the first hours of the evening at court, where Myrine sits dumbly, enthroned, and commands no one. Her remaining advisers exhaust themselves with squabbling long before the sun creeps behind the horizon, no decisions reached. A few old men and one poetess, removed from battle and ill-suited to its strategies, they can do little but trade their scant information between them. 

The scuffle of a foot in the uneasy silence: all look up. “I will take my leave,” says Kriasos, once a great orator of history who now stoops with the heaviness of death on his back. “I would rather die in my own home.”

Murmurs, agreements, spread around the table. “The rest of the army –” Pelthos begins weakly. They finish his thoughts: men returning to a dead city.

“How –” the word slips through her lips without control of her tongue; she presses her teeth together, considers. “How far are they?”

Alcmaeon shuffles his fingers across the map spread before them, his gouty hands skittering, unsteady. “Three days,” he pronounces; a former commander, he has no doubt marched in from the reaches of the Argive many times in his past.

“We perhaps – we could – we still have the city,” Telesilla says, to the map and to Alcmaeon’s gnarled hands. “If we could hold off the Spartans –”

“What we?” Pelthos spits across the table. “We are old men and weak women. Babes and children.”

“Three days only –” Alcmaeon muses, tracing the lines of the river on the map, weighing its distances. 

“We would all die,” Kriasos says. His voice, reedy and thin, nonetheless bears the heavier weight of the murmurs of those assembled around the table.

“We are to die anyway,” Telesilla says. Pushing away from the ancient war table, its worn edges smooth under her hands, she stands. “If I am to die by Spartan spear, I would yield my own as well.”

She waits for no response, but departs for the agora. Those who mourn in the streets might yet rouse.

++

In the somber grey of the middle-night, Telesilla stitches together the armor cut off Peranthos’s body. The waxed leather cord leaves her hands sticking and sore with working its still-stiff lengths, but as the falling moon leaves a silvery slice across the floor of her chamber, Telesilla lifts the cuirass and fits it over her body. At her feet, Aegiale kneels to fit the greaves, but they cut harshly into the hollows of her knees, far too long. On the table, another cuirass lies, its dusty pieces stiff; Aegiale has not lifted the panoply out of her trunk, has not polished the leather, since it was brought home stained with the blood of her husband.

Today, though, she works them to her own body, far too large and far too little protection. Her fine bones rattle in the stiff shell. Between them, they fasten each other tight, fingers clumsy in the unfamiliar task. Telesilla slides her fingers up the cracking leather of Aegiale’s cuirass to touch her at the throat, at the shoulder, at the elbow, to grip at her too-bare arms. The city whispers in preparation outside their window.

Telesilla gives what honey can come from the mouth of a muse: words, caresses. Liquid and sticky; lingering. Full of all that she would have said in their future years. Aegiale’s mouth on hers is wet, washed with tears, and her fingers at Aegiale’s arms grip tight, bruise. Under the pressing of her thumb, Aegiale’s blood thrums, quick and hot, and under her mouth her flesh yields up for the frantic press of lips to skin. 

Too soon, the bright peel of the alarum bell rings out. The Spartans approach.

++

She and her fellow song-scribes write of heroes. Of sole spears thrust across bare, battle-scarred plains; of the bright, bell-struck ring of two swords crashing. But a hoplite fights with a man at each shoulder; a phalanx, a machine. They move with the bodily ease of years; years the women, the old, and the babes-in-arms of Argos do not have to hand. 

The elderly stand at a few paces from the fortified gate; a baby’s wail pierces the uneasy air. Across the spanning walls, the ramparts which encircle the city and abut, boldly, the plain, rising above its expanse in towering authority, stand the city’s women. Poor and noble, freed and slave, ill-equipped and shaking. Shoulders pressing together, each woman a buttress for her neighbor. 

The sky breaks vicious crimson and against its light Telesilla sees the first dust approaching. “Hold steady,” she says, her voice a shadow of that which, in days past, proclaimed her lyrics to the hearts of her city. Her command works down the line in murmurs and gestures. They hold: breaths tight in their lungs, spears in sweat-slick hands, shields held with ill-ease. 

Out of the dust, a phalanx appears, first the hazy figure of a few men, then more, spread across the plain with shields held aloft. Their red standards snap and flicker violently, but all that is heard across the divide are the heavy, steady footsteps of a unified force. 

A cry rends the air, animal and pained, then another, a shout, a wail. The sound that tears itself from Telesilla’s throat rips the air from her body, sets her blood hot and thrumming, and with it she raises her spear and – _crash_ ¬– brings it down against her shield. Again – again – other women picking up their own weapons, the sounds syncopated and ragged down the wall. _Crash._ And again, and again, until they resolve together, until they overtake the marching footsteps of the Spartan men. A defiant _no – No – NO –_ a defense, an answer. The sound shakes down to her bones, reverberating against the very bricks of the city as they together, the women of Argos, refuse to stand down.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Telesila_  
>  H.D.
> 
>  
> 
> _In Argos – that statue of her;_  
>  _at her feet the scroll of her_  
>  _love-poetry, in her hand a helmet._
> 
>  
> 
> War is a fevered god  
> who takes alike  
> maiden and king and clod  
> and yet another one,  
> (ah withering peril!)  
> deprives alike,  
> with equal skill,  
> alike indifferently,  
> hoar spearman of his shaft,  
> wan maiden of her zone,  
> even he,  
> Love who is great War’s  
> very over-lord.  
> War bent  
> and kissed the forehead,  
> yet Love swift,  
> planted on chin  
> and tenderest cyclamen lift  
> of fragrant mouth,  
> fevered and honeyed breath,  
> breathing o’er and o’er  
> those tendrils of her hair,  
> soft kisses  
> like bright flowers.
> 
> Love took  
> and laid the sweet,  
> (being extravagant,)  
> on lip and chin and cheek,  
> but, ah, he failed  
> even he,  
> before the luminous eyes  
> that dart  
> no suave appeal,  
> alas, impelling me  
> to brave incontinent,  
> grave Pallas’ high command.
> 
> And yet the mouth!  
> ah Love ingratiate,  
> how was it you,  
> so poignant, swift and sure,  
> could not have taken all  
> and left me free,  
> free to desert the Argives,  
> let them burn,  
> free yet to turn  
> and let the city fall:  
> yea, let high War  
> take all his vengeful way,  
> for what am I?  
> I cannot save nor stay  
> the city’s fall.
> 
> War is a fevered god  
> (yet who has writ as she  
> the power of Love?)  
> War bent and kissed the forehead,  
> that bright brow,  
> ignored the chin  
> and the sweet mouth,  
> for that and the low laugh were his,  
> Eros ingratiate,  
> who sadly missed  
> in all the kisses count,  
> those eyebrows  
> and swart eyes,  
> O valiant one  
> who bowed  
> falsely and vilely trapped us  
> traitorous lord.
> 
> And yet,  
> (remembrance mocks,)  
> should I have bent the maiden  
> to a kiss?  
> Ares the lover  
> or enchanting Love?  
> but had I moved  
> I feared  
> for that astute regard;  
> for that bright vision,  
> how might I have erred?  
> I might have marred and swept  
> another not so sweet  
> into my exile;  
> I might have kept a look  
> recalling many and many a woman’s look,  
> not this alone,  
> astute, imperious, proud.
> 
> And yet  
> I turn and ask  
> again, again, again,  
> who march to death,  
> what was it worth,  
> reserve and pride and hurt?  
> what is it worth  
> to such as I  
> who turn to meet  
> the invincible Spartans’  
> massed and serried host?  
> what had it cost, a kiss?


End file.
